JURIST - Paper Chase: Supreme Court remands torture lawsuit by ex-Guantanamo detainees

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website; JURIST news archive] on Monday granted certiorari, vacated, and remanded [order list, PDF] the case of Rasul v. Myers [docket; cert. petition, PDF] for further consideration in light of the Court's June decision in Boumediene v. Bush [opinion, PDF; JURIST report]. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF; JURIST report] on the case five months before Boumediene was decided, holding that four former Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainees do not have the right to sue high-ranking government officials for alleged torture and infringement of religious practice during their captivity. In Boumediene, the Court held that federal courts have jurisdiction to review habeas corpus petitions filed by Guantanamo detainees who have been classified as "enemy combatants."

UK citizens Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed, and Jamal Al-Harith were released from Guantanamo in March 2004. In May 2004, Rasul and Iqbal said in an open letter to US President George W. Bush that they had suffered abuse at Guantanamo [JURIST report] similar to that perpetrated at Abu Ghraib [JURIST news archive] prison in Iraq. The Center for Constitutional Rights [advocacy website] filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] on their behalf in October 2004 against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Meyers, and others alleging [complaint] "deliberate and foreseeable action taken . . . to flout or evade the United States Constitution, federal statutory law, United States treaty obligations and long established norms of customary international law." The circuit court affirmed the district court's ruling dismissing the plaintiff's claims under the Alien Tort Statute [text] for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. The court dismissed the plaintiffs' claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act [text], finding that they did not have the right to sue for infringement of religious rights because they are aliens who were not in the US at the time of the alleged acts. The plaintiffs petitioned the Court for review [JURIST report] in August.

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